"A life sentence for a petty theft is really counterproductive to our whole system of justice," said Romano, a Stanford Law graduate who was admitted to the State Bar in 2004 and works for San Francisco appellate-defense lawyer Dennis Riordan.

"We hopefully begin to create a cadre of lawyers who care about that issue and work through their careers on these kinds of issues," Marshall said. "Or, at the very least, they learn that being a lawyer means caring about something really big."